Twitter Can Predict U.S. Election Results

Political consultants, university sociologists and amateur statisticians are now one step closer to using data from Twitter like they use polling data.

An Indiana University study has pulled, from the noise and muck of the stream, a statistically significant relationship between Twitter data and U.S. election results.

Specifically, the study found a correlation between the number of times a candidate for the House of Representatives was mentioned on Twitter in the months before an election and his or her performance in that election. The more a candidate is mentioned on Twitter, the better.

Previous studies have found a loose relationship between activity on Twitter and financial or political events. A 2010 study found that certain ways of analyzing Twitter could foretell a film's success at the box office better than a prediction market for that purpose. In 2011, a German Ph.D. student correlated stock market performance to certain analytic variables on Twitter. At the same time, activists are often disappointed when chatter about a candidate on Twitter fails to translate to electoral victory, and there's a sense that Twitter has almost no relation to political success. Read more...